As hardware for reproducing and storing high resolution or high quality video content is being developed and supplied, a need for a video codec for effectively encoding or decoding the high resolution or high quality video content is increasing. According to a conventional video codec, a video is encoded according to a limited encoding method based on a coding unit having a predetermined size.
Image data of the space domain is transformed into coefficients of the frequency domain via frequency transformation. According to a video codec, an image is split into blocks having a predetermined size, discrete cosine transformation (DCT) is performed on each block, and frequency coefficients are encoded in block units, for rapid calculation of frequency transformation. Compared with image data of the space domain, coefficients of the frequency domain are easily compressed. In particular, since an image pixel value of the space domain is expressed according to a prediction error via inter prediction or intra prediction of a video codec, when frequency transformation is performed on the prediction error, a large amount of data may be transformed to 0. According to a video codec, an amount of data may be reduced by replacing data that is consecutively and repeatedly generated with small-sized data.
A multi-view video codec encodes and decodes a base-view picture and one or more dependent-view pictures. The base-view picture and the one or more dependent-view pictures respectively include a texture picture and a depth picture corresponding to a view. Redundancy of the base-view picture and the one or more dependent-view pictures and redundancy between the texture picture and the depth picture are removed, thereby reducing data of a multi-view video.